Dachau gas chamber Exterior

"Inside as well as outside
were gas chambers with adjacent crematory ovens. Sid Olsen of
Time Magazine, Walter Riddler of the St. Paul Dispatch and I
followed a fresh trail of blood into the brick building with
a huge smokestack. Almost 100 naked bodies were stacked neatly
in the barren room with cement floors. They had come from a room
on the left marked "brausebad" for "shower bath."
From the story in the News York Times, April 30, 1945 by Associated
Press War Writer, Howard Cowan

Baracke X, the crematorium
and gas chamber building

The new crematorium building, called
Baracke X, contains four crematory ovens, a homicidal gas chamber
disguised as a shower room, and four disinfection gas chambers
used for delousing clothing. In the photograph above, the outside
wall of the gas chamber is in the section of the building directly
behind the recently-added round white table, which has a commemorative
plaque on the top of it.

The gas chamber is the only room in the
building which has no windows. To the right of the gas chamber
is a mortuary room where bodies were customarily stored, awaiting
cremation. The single door to the right of the mortuary room
leads to a small vestibule between the mortuary and the crematorium.
The wheel chair ramp in front of this door was added at a later
time. The double doors open into the crematory room where there
are four ovens for burning corpses. The windows on either side
of the double doors are the windows of the crematory room. The
last room on the right is another morgue room.

Close-up of bins on
outside wall, May 2001

The photo above shows the bins on the
outside wall of the Dachau gas chamber; Zyklon-B gas pellets
were poured onto the floor of the gas chamber through these bins.
The openings for the bins were centered on the inside wall of
the gas chamber. Notice the sloppy construction work on the outside
wall; the drain pipe from the roof is not centered between the
bins and the peephole, which has been closed up, is also not
centered. There is no opening for the peephole on the inside
of this wall, but there is a peephole inside on the opposite
wall.

The photograph below shows the south
end of the crematorium building which is the area to the left
of the gas chamber in the photograph at the top of this page.
The double doors, shown on the right in the photograph below,
open into a small vestibule. To the right of the vestibule is
the door into the waiting room. Behind the vestibule wall is
another small room which has an interior window that looks into
the waiting room. The room next to the waiting room is the undressing
room which has a door into the gas chamber.

Double doors lead to
the waiting room, May 2007

On the far left in the photograph above
is the open-air hallway where the doors to the 4 disinfection
chambers are located.

The photograph below shows the vent pipes
on the roof of Baracke X. There is one vent pipe directly over
the gas chamber which is the room right behind the white table.
Another vent pipe is over the vestibule next to the oven room.
The next photograph below was taken in May 1945; it shows the
same vent pipe directly over the gas chamber and the same small
vent pipe near the edge of the roof.

Vent on roof is directly
over the gas chamber

Former Dachau prisoners
haul dead bodies away for burial

Photo credit: Donald
E. Jackson, 40th Combat Engineer Regiment

The tall chimney of the crematorium can
be seen in the photograph below. Note that the crematorium has
2 large attic vents over it.

Tall chimney and 2
large attic vents over the crematorium

Baracke X was located outside the prison
enclosure and separated from it by the Würm river which
runs through a concrete canal. The outside wall of the gas chamber
was hidden from the view of the inmates by a screen of closely-planted
poplar trees in front of it. After the war, a ten-foot wall was
built to hide the crematoria area from the camp area.

The first photograph of the building
taken by the American Army shows a wooden screen that had been
placed by the Nazis in front of the bins in order to hide the
activity of the SS in pouring the Zyklon-B pellets onto the floor
of the gas chamber. In the museum, there are no photographs of
this building taken by the Nazis during construction or just
after it was finished.

At the south end of the building, there
is a display board which shows a photograph of the exterior of
the building with bodies piled up against it. The display is
shown in the photograph below. The caption reads: "The dead
on the grounds of the crematorium, end of April/beginning of
May 1945." Note the wooden screen which is hiding the bins
on the gas chamber wall.

Photograph on a display
at the south end of Baracke X

The photograph in the display above was
taken by a Yugoslavian resistance fighter who was a prisoner
at Dachau.